


it had to be you

by lutzaussi



Series: red threads [1]
Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Anbu Hatake Kakashi, M/M, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-19
Updated: 2017-03-19
Packaged: 2018-10-05 21:47:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,252
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10317674
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lutzaussi/pseuds/lutzaussi
Summary: Iruka has only slept a handful of hours in the past few days, has successfully met his soulmate, and really deserves some goddamn sleep and a proper fucking explanation.or: in which Iruka inadvertently is the key to taking down the entirety of Root, though he only learns so after the fact.





	

“A matchmaker.”

“Yes, shops with red flower patterns on their doors are typically matchmakers,” Anko pushed the door in, ignored the tinkling of the bell, and bellowed, “Akemi, there is a poor, helpless boy in need of your assistance!”

Iruka was torn between running and crying. _He_ wasn’t the one with an obsession about finding his soulmate, _he_ wasn’t upset about being in his twenties and not having found his soulmate yet—there were people who didn’t find their soulmates until they were sixty! He wasn’t fucking worried about it! It would happen when it was supposed to!

Akemi came out of the back, from behind a red curtain, and stopped in her tracks when she saw Anko, saw Iruka’s arm trapped in one of the woman’s hands, saw the expression on his face.

“Anko-san,” she said, her voice low, “I know you out-rank me, but please unhand Umino-sensei.”

-

Really, no week was complete without Anko dragging or trying to drag Iruka to one of the half-dozen matchmakers around Konoha, not to mention the ones who had ramshackle shops in back alleys that she knew about. Iruka didn’t know how the hell a matchmaker was supposed to help him follow a red thread that he couldn’t even see yet.

Anko insisted, as Anko always insisted, but Iruka had work to do at the mission desk, papers to grade, and as soon as Akemi told Anko to let go of him (and she did, fancy that), Iruka was gone.

He made it to the mission room barely on time, and in enough of a fluster that several jounin looked ready to pounce on him as soon as he relieved one of the other chuunin.

It was a lot. And Iruka might have directed pure killing intent at the first jounin who made it to his line, but that did a pretty effective job of shutting the rest of them up. There was still a heavy flow of assorted jounin and chuunin which didn’t taper off until a few minutes before Iruka got off-shift.

Then there were the papers to grade, food to make and eat, and by the time he thought he was finished with work for the day, more work came to him.

-

Iruka was the closest thing that Konohagakure had to a fuinjutsu expert, barring Jiraiya’s existence on a whole. So, in addition to his duties at the mission desk, his responsibilities as a teacher at the Academy, and trying to stay sane and social, he occasionally had to act as a consultant on the topic of seals. It wasn’t necessarily often, and Iruka took it with the same soldier-like attitude that Hiruzen found so interesting about him.

And Hiruzen was the reason he was standing in the Tower at half past twelve in the morning, really wishing he had that magical ability that some of his fellow shinobi had to fall asleep while standing. There were at least four ANBU milling around, Shikaku muttering to Ibiki, and Hiruzen presiding over them all. Nobody had told Iruka what he was doing there, but he assumed whatever it was had to do with a small, egg-shaped box that was sitting on the Hokage’s desk.

It…hummed. Nobody else seemed to notice that, and it was unnerving.

“Umino-san,” Ibiki finally said, turning away from Shikaku.

“Yes?” Iruka stepped forward.

“This box,” he gestured to said box, “was retrieved by an ANBU squad. It is guarded by an impressive number of seals, and we have so far been unable to sift through them to open it.”

Iruka let his eyes flick to the ANBU, then back to the box. ANBU always knew more about sealing than the average run of the mill shinobi, but for them to need him meant it was important. “And you need me to get through them,” he stated. Shikaku, Ibiki, and Hiruzen nodded in tandem.

He stepped forward again, and when nobody moved to stop him he continued to the desk, frowning at the box. The humming felt stronger as he neared it, and he stopped with his hands about ten inches on either side of the box.

“I can’t do this here,” he said after a moment, looking up at Hiruzen. “This has at least three levels of cascading explosion seals on it inside the matrix. And…I can’t tell if that’s poison gas.”

“Shut down Practice Field Six,” Ibiki said, turning to the ANBU, “It has the least encroachment of forest. Hound, get the sealing and barrier team, as many as you can.”

-

It was somewhat unnerving to be inside of someone else’s barrier—in this case, the ANBU sealing and barrier team’s—especially when it was _so_ large. Iruka didn’t have time to worry about that, though, just unpacked the papers and brush he’d brought. The box was sitting in the exact center of the barrier, and Iruka sat next to it. If he had time and more chakra, he would’ve been able to go through the seals on the box without using the paper, but he preferred it anyway.

There were at least twenty layers of seals around the box, some of them etched in the metal, some of them merely held by chakra. If he wanted to die early, he could short out the chakra-molded seals, but that would cascade the rest of them, and he really didn’t want to explode.

-

It was three hours. Three hours of work in the middle of the night in a cold field and Iruka was ready to pass out by the time he had found all of the key mechanisms to the cascades. All he needed to do was short them all at the same time, and they would go dead. Iruka checked his chakra levels, pulled a seal out of his pocket just in case. He could stick it on himself and upon contact with his chakra it would form a barrier quicker than he’d be able to without something to focus.

He found the nearest ANBU outside of the large barrier, communicated that he was going to set the box off via speedy handsigns to the boar-masked shinobi. There was a moment of waiting, while the ANBU flickered off to consult somebody else, but when they returned and nodded Iruka took off back to the center of the barrier.

He sat back down in front of the box, steeled himself, and shoved as much chakra as he could into the twenty-three seals simultaneously.

-

Iruka hadn’t lied when he had told the medics he would be fine, but they were still surprised when he had full range of motion, full chakra control, and (while admittedly somewhat low) normal levels of chakra. He just…was going to have some scabs on his face. And he was hungry. Very hungry.

As soon as the entire entourage—sans medics, who had peeled off toward the hospital—made it to the Tower and the box had been delivered to the Hokage, Iruka left, feeling like he couldn’t get away fast enough. He’d see the Hokage later, at any rate, and he had three hours left to sleep before teaching. Hiruzen, at least, would understand. The only thing keeping Iruka going was that he would have the next day after class free, no mission room duty.

He slept for two and a half hours, had enough time to shower and actually eat breakfast before he left for the Academy, feeling woefully unprepared to deal with Naruto and his cronies.

-

The cronies were easy enough to deal with, and Iruka supposed he should’ve given Naruto detention or something for how horrible the boy had been, but maybe he was feeling particularly lenient. No, not intent to get home and sleep more, obviously. Though that was what he did.

Not for long. He had to get groceries, and he figured if he was out, he might as well stop by the Tower to see that everything had gone smoothly after he had left. Iruka assumed so, because nobody had come to fetch him a second time and there weren’t any smoking holes in the building, but it would be good to know.

Hiruzen was in the mission room but preparing to leave for his own offices when Iruka walked by, and when the older man saw him he smiled, the laugh lines around his mouth and eyes crinkling. “Iruka,” he said, “walk with me. What brings you here? I heard you didn’t have a shift today.”

Iruka spared him a sideways glance, because he’d woken up to a note on his windowsill telling him that his shift had been taken over by someone else early that morning. “I wanted to make sure everything went fine,” he said, being intentionally vague about it.

“Ah, yes, your efforts were very much appreciated,” Hiruzen said, still looking slightly amused, “it has been dealt with, thanks to you.”

Iruka turned before they made it to the Hokage’s offices, and excused himself, feeling only slightly confused.

-

Four hours of grading and lesson planning later, Iruka yawned and stretched, pushing away from his cluttered kitchen table. It was still relatively early, and it being relatively early meant that it was the normal sort of time for one to be eating dinner. And he even had food in his kitchen ready to be made into a meal.

Iruka was all levels of thrilled to make dinner, eat dinner, and go to bed. Anko had not appeared at all during the day, he’d gotten a jump on the next few weeks of scheduling, and he was completely done with his backlog of grading. But—there was Hiruzen’s face, earlier in the day, the sort of face that promised to be trouble down the line for somebody else.

So it wasn’t really a surprise when a squad of ANBU appeared in the middle of his kitchen while he was in the middle of simmering some beef.

Three of them departed almost as quickly as they had appeared, leaving only a man with a hound mask and a tube of rolled papers in one hand.

“Can this wait?” Iruka said, knowing that he sounded uncharitable, but he was getting to be rather sick of the ANBU at that moment of his life. And he was in the middle of making dinner!

Hound held out the rolled papers, said, “Hokage-sama needs you to figure out what these mean.”

Iruka turned the stove off. He moved the pot from the heated element, put the rest of the ingredients back into the fridge, and took the papers.

-

Hound remained standing while Iruka sat and spread the papers out on the table. There were a dozen of them, all with different seals diagrammed on them, notes taken in a shorthand that Iruka didn’t recognize around them.

“Give me—give me a few minutes,” Iruka said, eyes flicking up to Hound. The man nodded ever so slightly. “Where were these found?” Iruka asked after a few moments, flipping the papers over one by one to see if any of them were double sided. He missed what man said in reply.

“What?” He looked up from the papers to the ANBU.

“Three of them were on the box that you unsealed yesterday,” the ANBU clarified. He shifted ever so slightly, as if trying to seem less imposing. Not that the vague answer helped any.

Iruka nodded, already focused back on the designs picked out in decisive strokes on the fine paper. The base seal matrices used were basic, at best, but that meant little. Whoever had been plotting the seals out knew exactly what each stroke of ink meant, the precise widths and angles.

“I don’t,” Iruka began, voice quiet, “I know I’ve seen seals in this style but—”

He set the papers on the table, strode out of the kitchen to his small living room. With the convenience of sealing scrolls he didn’t have to have a wall of bookshelves, but it still took him a couple of minutes to find the right scroll and then fetch the right book out of that. Hound stayed out of his way, but followed his every move silently. Iruka returned to the kitchen, book in hand, and flipped through it until he found what he was looking for.

-

“Those ones are just simple variations of exploding tags, this one it—it eats chakra, so do these two. This one is a dud, it just lets chakra through,” Iruka moved to the last three, pointed to two of them, his brow furrowed, “these two are…they’re not complete. I don’t know what the original intent was, but they look like they were made to be used as chakra storage to tie into another seal. Very inefficient, though. The last one,” he paused, rubbed the scar on his nose with his thumb and forefinger. “It’s a keyword seal—mm, no, that’s not totally accurate.”

“What does it do?” Hound asked, and Iruka tried to consolidate the thoughts whirling in his mind.

“It’s like—a long-distance seal,” Iruka said, running a finger over the symbols, “but it’s placed on a person, probably on their throat or somewhere around there since it depends on them saying a key word or phrase. If they do, it activates and…”

“And?” Hound could probably use logic to figure that out, but Iruka sighed and said, “They’re dead.”

-

Iruka put his derailed dinner back on track and went around to double-up on his wards and traps while the beef simmered and the rice cooked. He was exhausted and twitchy, which wasn’t a good mix for anything, but especially not for getting sleep. And—he was half sure he was going insane. Every so often out of the corners of his eyes he would see flashes of something red.

That mere fact set off the voice in his head that sounded like Anko, the voice that pestered him about going to a matchmaker and finding his soulmate.

He took a moment after his dinner was eaten and cleaned up, his fingers pressed against his closed eyes. The presence of ANBU meant it was a big deal, and big deals were not something that Umino Iruka liked to be wrapped up in. Iruka sighed, flicked the lights off in the kitchen and the living room, and grabbed the book that had remained out on the kitchen table. After a bath he felt more normal, and he strengthened his wards one last time before heading to bed to read.

-

Instead of half past midnight, it was two minutes to three in the morning when Iruka was awoken by tapping on his window and someone trying to work through the wards.

He pushed the curtains aside only to find Hound perched on the sill of his window, making the tiny pot of green onions he had sitting out there teeter precariously. Iruka knew he was being rude as he glared at the other man.

‘Hokage-tower-need-you’ the man signed, and Iruka was extremely thankful he’d picked up the ANBU handsigns as he returned ‘five-minutes’. Hound nodded, and Iruka closed the curtains. He dressed in two minutes, stowed his basic sealing kit in his vest in another, and was back at the window in time to catch the onions before they could fall to their doom. Hound took off at a relatively slow pace, but they still made it to the Tower quickly.

Even though there was always business occurring the Tower, it was eerily silent as they walked up to the Hokage’s office. Iruka’s twitchiness, made worse by still seeing faint hints of red in his peripheral vision, was not lessened by the long shadows inside the building, and it was somewhat of a relief when the Hokage’s office opened to light.

“Iruka-san, thank you for coming so quickly,” Ibiki said, holding the door open and nodding to Hound, who disappeared.

“We need you to explain this seal,” came Inoichi’s voice from near Hiruzen’s desk, and Iruka felt not relieved at all to find the entirety of the T&I leadership inside the office, staring at the last seal that Iruka had explained for Hound.

-

Iruka slept from four until seven that morning, waking in time to go to work even though Hiruzen had emphatically told him to take the day off. He was wide awake, though, and no amount of lying in bed could make him fall back asleep, so he decided to do chores, in the hope that they would exhaust him enough to sleep more.

He had no more glimpses of red and no more ANBU agents appearing in front of him until he was heading home from the fish market. Right in front of stand that always had the best salmon, the red blossomed in front of him, forming a thin thread tied around the smallest finger on his right hand.

“What the hell?” Iruka breathed. He didn’t drop anything, but took off after the thread at top speed, careening up off of the streets and onto the roofs, heart beating faster and faster as he realized that he was heading straight to his own apartment.

His own apartment, which had the living room window ajar and all the wards and traps down. Iruka was more than a little wary, but the red thread continued in front of him, unbroken and waving with the light breeze.

So he went inside, dropped his bag on the floor and had a kunai out as soon as his feet touched the hardwood floor.

He followed the thread, and found someone lying on the floor next to the coffee table, nearly under the couch.

The porcelain mask, which should’ve been in an unbroken stylization of a hound’s face, was cracked vertically in two places. Iruka could tell that the man underneath was still breathing, but it was so faint, and his chakra signature likewise so, that it was obvious he was unconscious. The little thread that Iruka had been hesitantly following was curled around the comatose man, ended in a neatly tied bow around the other man’s right pinky finger.

Iruka snapped away from that, away from sentimentality, and hefted him up, talking through it just in case the man was somehow aware, “Hound-san, it’s Iruka, I’m going to—I’m going to body flicker us to the Hokage’s office, we’ll be able to get through the wards. Gods, I’m—” Iruka stopped talking, stopped thinking, focused on the Tower.

-

Iruka remained in the Hokage’s office as several dozen ANBU operatives, medics, and jounin came and went. Nobody was telling him anything, and all he really wanted was to know what the fuck was happening. He was tempted to leave but if he did so he’d never get anything out of Hiruzen.

And. The Hound. Who was, apparently, his soulmate. Iruka didn’t even fucking know where the other man was, though he was sure he could find him if he followed the red thread that was winded out of the door of the office. He also didn’t know who the other man was, which was also a pretty big oversight. So he stayed in his chair in the corner of the office until there was a break in people coming and going, and then he pounced on the Hokage.

Hiruzen sighed like he usually did, tented his hands in front of his face and said, “Iruka, this is extremely confidential, I’m not sure if—”

Iruka glowered. And held up his right hand and decided, what the hell, no better time to stand up to authority than now. “Whoever is under that hound mask is my _soulmate_ , and I have no idea who he is or where he is but I could go find that out on my own, if you would prefer.”

Hiruzen’s eyes narrowed, ever so slightly, but he knew—and Iruka knew that he knew—that Iruka would never lie about something like that. “Iruka,” he said, paused, and sighed, “he was to be transferred to the main hospital by now. I’ll send you with Shinobu after this.”

“And the rest?” Iruka asked, pursing his lips when Hiruzen looked away from him.

“It was a covert operation, and I have enough trust in you that this will not be spread around,” the old man said. Iruka nodded, and he continued, “Shimura Danzo was in control of a branch of ANBU that handled secret operations; the information you provided us with was enough for us to rid him of that control.”

Face value was enough for that, Iruka decided, and he didn’t complain when the Hokage called his secretary and the petite woman led him to the hospital. She told him a little more than her employer on the way over, “Iruka-san, I’m so sorry you got caught up with this. It’s just been subterfuge and secrecy—but it’s over now, thank the gods.”

They paused outside of the hospital complex, and Iruka hesitated before asking, “Why did they transfer him out?” He knew that ANBU had their own medical unit in the Tower, but he had never heard of moving one of their operatives out.

“He’s being retired,” Shinobu said, holding the door open for him, “Room 113, just down the hall.”

-

The lights were on and one of the medic-nin was scribbling on the chart when Iruka cracked the door open. She glanced up and shot a thin smile at him as she said, “Please, come in, Umino-san. He should be waking up any minute now.”

Iruka stepped inside the room and shuffled to the side before he fully looked at the man on the bed and his breath caught in his throat.

Hatake fucking Kakashi, of the Copy Wheel Eye. He forced himself to swallow the unbelieving laughter that was bubbling up his throat, but that didn’t stop the medic from shooting a concerned look in his direction. He remained silent, leaning against the wall with his hands pressed behind him, not wanting to fidget.

The medic broke the silence of the room when she leaned over Kakashi’s bed, a smile of some sorts tugging on her face. “Ah, Hatake-san, good to see you awake again. There’s someone here to see you.”

Feeling immensely awkward and horribly out of place, Iruka stepped forward and said, in as measured a tone as he could, “Hello, Hatake-san.”

The man’s face was discolored with bruises, and his left eye was covered, as was the bottom half of his face, but Iruka could still see the surprise pulling his face, the way his eye travelled from Iruka’s face to his arm, and then he passed back out.

-

Iruka stopped by the hospital again after he’d gone home and slept for a few hours and replaced the now-gross fish in his living room with fresh fish from the market (placed properly in the fridge). Kakashi was awake, and he didn’t pass out when Iruka appeared.

They were silent for a solid five minutes, until Iruka sat down in one of the chairs provided and said, “I don’t really know what’s happening.”

Kakashi’s visible eye curved in such a way that Iruka knew he was smiling, and he said, “I really don’t either.”

-

He was there when Kakashi was released, because apparently the man had a neurotoxin of some sort introduced to his system and was required to have someone stay with him overnight. Iruka had expected Kakashi to ask Gai but Gai was on a mission and—really, there wasn’t anyone else who was close to the man, so the responsibility fell on him.

Iruka felt suitably prepared to deal with the still-mostly-drugged man. After all, one adult was nowhere near as bad as thirty pre-genin wielding sharpened shuriken.

Kakashi had acquiesced to going to Iruka’s apartment, if only because it was much closer to the hospital, but also (as he said in a slurred, run-on sentence), there was no food in his apartment, and he didn’t want Iruka to have to go buy any. Iruka really couldn’t argue with that, and that was how he found himself herding a slightly more lucid but also cranky Kakashi to his bed.

“Sensei, I don’t want you to give up your bed for me,” he complained for maybe the fifth time in a minute.

“It’s _Iruka_ , and you are still healing,” Iruka returned firmly, keeping a solid hand on Kakashi’s back. He considered it a blessing that the man wasn’t actually making an effort, but it was still extremely satisfying when he did get Kakashi in the bed.

He turned to leave once Kakashi was down, but the man caught his right pinky with his own, the red of their shared thread enough to give Iruka pause.

“So, soulmates?” Kakashi asked, tugging Iruka back to the bed until he was sitting on it. They had gotten along surprisingly well whenever Iruka had visited him in the hospital, and it almost terrified him that they kept that same, casual closeness when removed from that environment.

“I suppose,” Iruka replied, looking down at their intertwined fingers on the sheets. He still—it was still a lot. He couldn’t really fathom it.

Kakashi tugged him, almost insistently, “Come now, _sensei_ , I’m sure you need sleep too.”

“You hardly know me,” Iruka said, though he did slide under the blankets, kicking his slippers off, “and I hardly know you.”

“We have the rest of our lives for that,” Kakashi muttered into the pillow, “starting right now.”

Iruka smiled, and turned off the lamp.


End file.
